Dude I’m so bored of listening to UKpostsrs pushing products .. this was a really good idea and was well described and presented. Thank you!

Hardware Haven also built his own UKposts channel. It's great!

When ever I research something like this 90% of the time I get people telling me not to do this. I'm glad to see this video cuz it makes me confident I can do this with out to many problems

I have 24 drives in 3 stacks of 8 like this, running off two 16e HBAs passed through proxmox to a TrueNAS core VM. It works without issue. I did the exact same as the video with individual fan-out cables and SATA power expanders. The whole thing is cooled by a big ol box fan that keeps room temp.

Maybe too obvious, but remove the internal 400W PSU, and put the 650W one in there to handle everything (PC and JBOD).

Only thing missing is the supermicro backplane to clean up the cabling. I did something similar to this a while ago and I thought the fans would be overkill, ends up they were useful when actually doing large copies from my workstation. Used that setup for a couple years just because I was proud I'd built it myself.

With the price of the prebuilt jbod enclosures, this is a very good option. Another good option is a real server case if you have space. I got my 4u case for £400, and spend another £30 on a trio of Arctic P12max fans to get a quieter build. This one has 24 front drive bays, and works great.

10:20 Lifehack: instead of cutting a support bracket - you can bend it in or out, that increases gap to really shove any connectors through. I've got Graphics card through razor connector in a very slim PC and because of that I was forced to connect to card's ports inside the case. So I bent bracket, thrown DVI through and bent it back.

a lot of libraries have 3d printers available, you might be able to make drive sleds for that acrylic enclosure. Or get a friend with a 3d printer. The biggest life-hack for getting cheap components is knowing people. I learned where the cast-off computers go for some departments in my university and you're allowed to just walk in and go picking, but it's also a slight secret.

If you want to make a bigger JBOD enclosure you can also get a SAS expander (to mount in the JBOD enclosure) and a SAS card with only 2 external ports. You need A LOT of mechanical drives to saturate 8 SAS 6gbit channels.

I made a similar (but less professional) setup recently. LSI HBA in my Dell R620. HBA off EBay was ~$35 and came with both cables for 8 drives. Currently they live in a pile on top of my server with a box fan cooling them. Powered by a small form factor power supply I pulled from an old Inspiron desktop. Was having issues with a TrueNAS VM so I decided to do ZFS in proxmox directly. It’s been working great. I do plan on getting a proper enclosure made, and you video makes me think laser cutting or CNC might be the best option, especially since my schools shop has both. Love the content, I actually setup my first server (2008 Mac Pro) after watching your video about crafty with CasaOS. Upgraded it basically immediately for more RAM. Paid $210 for a R620 with 2x E5-2680v2 CPUs, and 256gigs of DDR3 from a local shop. My boss gave me eight 2 terabyte HDDs from some of our old servers and a HP 48 port PoE+ gigabit network switch (for a future project)

There is an other version of this enclosure where, we can mount a psu and it looks like a huge genga block, i am not sure if it was a concept design or what, but i found it cool. I am sure after a few videos, nas bro will find a entire pc case made out of a acrylic panels

I have added this acrylic piece on my wishlist for quite sometime. I'm glad i found your video. I'll be doing this jbod thing once i get to this point in future. Thanks for this amazing video

I did this with an Amazon stainless 4x hard drive cage with a 120mm fan. Added a thin mini itx motherboard with dc power supply on a sheet of plexiglass with a female sata power to 4x sata power.

I have been looking at those JBOD racks for a bit, thanks for making this video! On the issue of the fan brackets on the back, if you use IPS Weld-On 16 cement on one side when you have screwed in one side of the drives it is MUCH easier to assemble. You can add cement to the other side after the rack is fully assembled for additional stability.

There's something quite endearing when you've done a DIY and it all "just works (tm)". I guess that's because you've done it yourself, it's non-trivial to put together and get all the right components ... and it's yours. If you've saved money - even better 😎 I think video like this inspire us tired everyday Sysadmins to pick ourselves up and do some cool tech for ourselves - and if this was mostly built out of "stuff I had lying around", the cost would be very little. Thanks - another good idea! As for what to do with it now that it's assembled, up and running ... maybe make it available over you 10Gb connection(s) as an iSCSI host that allows other systems to mount the storage remotely (that is what we do with VMs at work).

Very pro way of DIYIing them, of which I had previously wondered about a best approach to using those open drive holders. Thanks for showing the best way to do it.

This was a pretty nice idea ! Just make sure to print out the serial numbers and put them on the side so if a drive fails you can end up identifying it easier!

Thanks for your great videos! You are exploring all the options I've been playing with and helping me make sure I'm looking at lots of options. I've seen these racks on Ali Express for a while but didn't want to have to take it apart to change a drive. For just a few pence per drive more, you could have the drives on rails. Use plywood or MDF panels and screws to form a rigid box. I'd go with 3, top, bottom and middle. A pair of screws/pins/stand-offs on each side of the drive could ride in a slotted acrylic rail attached to the side panel. The drives can slide in and out, and the case is wider by only twice the thickness of the acrylic. A 3rd locking screw could fix the drives into the slots. This allows for vertical or horizontal orientation of the array. I hope some enterprising reader puts out a kit! I'm using a Yottamaster 5-bay, USB-C, 10Gig external enclosure. It identifies each drive by serial number on Unraid on my Asrock Taichi, but not on the little Lenovo minis. The Serial numbers are visible to Proxmox/Truenas on any platform I've tried. (I imagine that's a driver's issue with Unraid.) I've never seen any of the "drop-out" issues described by some posters, whatever drop-outs are. I paid £210 direct from Yottamaster and haven't looked back. It's quiet, cool, and very clean with only the A/C and USB C cable. I'd really like to see a SAS or PCI attachment option on these. I've also used the Icy Dock 4x 2.5 inch drive SATA housing. I used the 4-drive version because it accommodates 15mm drives. The enclosure fits in a 5.25 inch drive bay. I use 4x 5TB notebook drives in a zfs zraid1 array for 15TB net storage. More than I need. Next time, I'll use a zraid2 array for 8T net. Thanks again for your excellent videos and for doing the hard work for the rest of us!

This is the kind of stuff I’m here for!! Legit affordable options and totally thinking outside of the box (or case in this matter)! Love it.

I think that's pretty awesome! Not only do you save a few bucks and have a fun little DIY project but you don't limit compatibility as you mentioned that so many of the USB enclosures do. I ran into that with USB enclosures repeatedly and it's a huge headache. If I were you I'd keep it and use it. You built it and although it may be a bit janky it looks pretty slick if you keep it facing front. Thanks!

Holy Crap! I just bought this 2 weeks ago. lol Edit: Also, once you went SAS, your connectivity and Stability became infinity better than USB. It's well worth what little you paid for them. Way back, I built a FreeNAS server and used USB to expand. Totally against any recommendation from the FreeNAS Forum. Needless to say those four external boxes eventually bricked. 4x USB = 4x failure rate. I've gone SAS Card with an External open frame using a SAS Expander Card. A Graphics Miner PCIe expander to Power the SAS Card (even though the SAS Expander is an PCIe x4 card, it only uses the power from PCIe, all data is over SAS), and it works like a charm. The SAS Expander does need an Extra fan though, it gets Hot! So I use a 1-Slot Scroll Fan (Used before Graphics Cards regularly had their own Fans).

I love DIY solutions like this. Many of us don't have the budget for enterprise hardware. This is very helpful.

I love the idea when you already have most of the bits. This is clearly in the realm of "you could...but should you?"

Im running everything on a DIY Zimaboard NAS with 2 Harddrives in a woodworking diy case. This is exactly what I was looking into to add more drives. Thanks!

I love this channel for the tidbits of info you dish out. Like the "add to psu" hickey. I had no idea that type of thing existed and didn't have much luck finding reference points for inspiration. You're providing a positive service to tech humanity. I threw together a JBOD shelf that was full of jank. This was an enjoyable view.

Was just thinking about this! Yesterday I hacked out the 5.25 inch bay separating the two front slots on my p410 (same case, different chipset) for a cheap 3 bay enclosure i wanted to add more drives soon, this video was right on cue! great video :)

I actually did something slightly differerent to get my drives into my case. I have a MicroATX case (Thermaltake Versa H18) with a MicroATX mobo. It has a power supply shroud, but no drive bays (just places to screw in some drives). I bought a 5-drive hard drive cage that is supposed to fit in a 5x 5.25-inch bay, I think. Then I just used double-sided tape to attach it to the top of my PSU shroud at the front of the case. The case and this cage and perfectly sized so that the cage and drives don't interfere with the motherboard, and they fit with the case's side panel on. They also get easy access to air from the front panel. This won't work in every case, but it was perfect for my scenario! And since this was internal, I was able to easily connect each drive with SATA cables directly to the motherboard.

This is OUTSTANDING! I have also been struggling with storage, i use an older HTPC case for a NAS/PLEX server with TrueNas Core (terrified to swap to Scale) I am using a 7th gen i5 Commercial Matx board, with 16gb ram, the case has room for roughly 6 drives, but with some ingenuity was able to use some single Drive enclosures and some extra Metal slot covers and Pop rivited the enclosures to the slot covers and BAM! Two more secure Drive bays in the unused space where a full ATX board would be! I will say for your solution, you may have been able to power those drives with a MUCH smaller PICO power supply or even a used OEM SFF PSU for much cheaper! Just a thought! Drives don't need all that power! with a few molex adapters you are golden!

In a past life, I used an erector set to group pairs of drives together in a stack. These days, there are external single bay metal enclosures sold in pairs on Amazon for $6. They hold a drive with integrated rubber mounts and have a provision on the front for screws. They slide and lock together for easy stacking and come in power-coated black out of the box. I picked up 4 bays for my NAS as an external mirror and I only turn it on for weekly archives.

It's amazing how big the market is for storage, yet there is so few solutions that work well. That includes m.2, sata ssd, and mechanical drives. I've got a half dozen ssd's and another of nvme drives just sitting here from upgrades done in the past. I would love to be able to buy a product to hook them up to my server for storage that wasn't usb. I like that you found a solution to the power issue that normally plagues users with external storage needs.

You can make the acrylic enclosure a bit taller and put the PSU in the bottom, and you can use an IEC Y splitter to reduce the power cables to one instead of two (one for each PSU). Also, there are many cheap fan controller boards with thermal probe to controller the fans' speed, I think that will make it a bit quiter while it's idle

Great video, I actually made something like this myself recently apart from I did not end up using some acrylic kits. I had some spare 3mm plywood lying around and I must say if you have the means to cut it straight and pre-drill the mounting holes after you have spray painted it it can do just as good a job as those acrylic kits you bought from China. You did a great job my only comment and advice would be you can purchase far smaller power bricks which provide 12 volts and up to 9 amps which would be more than enough to power all of those drives meaning you could ditch the pc power supply but you'd lose the power on functionality. You could then mount one of these power bricks to the side or top of the case. Most of them use barrel jacks but they sell converters. Even hanging out the back but more clean. Great work, keep it up Edit: P.S I also own one of those sabrent x4 2.5" enclosures and they are indeed trash, why companies wish to hide drive serials and labels with they're own name and branding is a mystery to me.

I built something similar, but it was just... too janky for my liking. I ended up buying a SilverStone CS382 case, it fits a mATX board and has 8 3.5" hot swap bays. It's a fantastic NAS case and solved all my high drive count issues pretty much completely

What a creative project which solves a real problem. I was thinking recently to expand my storage solution and this seems like a very viable solution.

I have actually been considering this as an option while shopping for a case for the family... thing... so it's really helpful that this dropped today!

I did something very similar, I used a drop of hot glue to hold the washers (I used silicone washers) in place.. I also just made my own case, I used a metal HD rack as a pattern, and the one you bought is very very close to what I made, I had some plexiglass that was left from a different project. I was able to put 10, 10TB HD's.. I'm going to redo how mine is connected and use the way you did it, the way I did was basically use them as connected external drives.. I also used a separate power supply to power mine too, I had a older one, I repurposed to power my HD's.. I wish you had this video out 4 months ago.. Thank you for sharing..

Don't worry about leaving those washers out. They would provide ZERO noise isolation since the screw is still hard connected to the panel and the drive. To provide isolation you cannot have a hard mount between the drive and the panel. Something like those screw grommets you might see would do this, but a washer will not.

I love your videos dude, I've learned a lot from watching your NAS and Router tutorials, I've yet to see anyone do a tutorial on how to access your NAS from outside your local network though, I think it'd be cool if you made one.

I really like your solution. I've been looking for something similar, and everything out there is expensive & wasteful. But not this! I love the power supply extension and how the HBA works.

Nice video. Good visuals and audio with sufficient explanation. Well done sir.

This is just what I was looking for. I had considered one of those JBOD cases but avoided it because of the cost. Thanks for the information.

You've done a really nice job there, well done 👍 Great video quality and presentation too. That enclosure is quite clever, using the drives themselves as a structural component.

I've tried all sorts of external enclosure, USB is often flaky when loaded and USB hubs are trash and often just reset when you are writing to multiple drives. Yes everything had its own power brick, this is just controllers hanging and resetting. SAS cards and sas expanders are turnkey and rock-solid, and in most cases much cheaper than large USB enclosures

did something similar and modded the powercables: you can pop of the backpanel of the sata plugs and pull the cables of the crimp terminals. plug them unpopulated into the hard-drive stack and then line up your 5 fresh (!!!) powercables into them (you dont want to reuse the old ones, they got "bite marks" from the crimp terminals and when unlucky, short out on these open connections). cut away the exccess cables and you got perfect poweraddapters for your stack.

Enjoyed this one! Fun project. Thank you!

That's awesome! I have an old PC that I went with the icy dock solution and 2.5" SSD's but was not very happy with how it turned out. In this case I used an internal hardware raid, which in doing reading later found out wasn't really hardware raid anyways. Here, your CPU will deal with the drives and that doesn't take a lot of processing power! So for an older machine you don't want going to e-waste I love this. Thanks for sharing!

If you want a bunch of HDDs but don't want to add a whole second PSU to power them, Corsair sells a little $30 unit that takes a PCI-E 12v power input and sends out 20ampsa of 5v power for connecting a bunch of drives to. Basically expanding the 5v rail a bunch of the one PSU you have.

I think this is a really great solution because of the expandability. True nas + a little bit older computer that can handle the data transfer has so much more appeal to me than $1,000 16 bay nas. If you don't need instant access but want to be able to store a bunch of old videos, that's such an easy way to have all the hard drives with all the old stuff on it that you can just stick in the closet in a very organized kind of way. It looks like it's a bit annoying with the screws and washers and the cable management, but it's definitely a worthwhile endeavor. That's very expandable. Love the videos

this was Exactly what I was looking for THANK YOU

2:06 I have the SAME 9010. Stuck in two 23TB drives in the same location. Dell is ALL STOCK. Love the fact it has WOL (Just need to set it up properly! ) The plastic drive cages are wonderful, and quiet. and just sits there. Plenty of expansion and speed for hooking up large drives to back up all your old data for the last 25 years or so. Built in Display just means more room for PCI-e add in cards in this simple and quiet well built system. I see you used a Lenovo afterwards after watching the video. WHoops! Anyways, these plastic enclosures are PERFECT if you use some aftermarket hardware bits, and put them inside of an old PC Case. Or even a Mini ITX case as they are easy to gut out.

This was a great video simply for how it demonstrated the SATA-to-HBA and Add2PSU combination. With that mechanism you can effectively create any DAS of your choosing.

I had a Corsair case, cant remember which, but it supported 8 drives by default, and could expand up to 12 with buying another drive bay that bolts into the tower when you remove the 5.25" bays (So 12 tall). When I got past 12 drives, I ended up buying 3 more bays and stacking them onto each other the same as they support, and then drilled a few holes in the bottom of the case and stacked them right next to the other ones (2 stacks of 12). Ended up with a tower that allowed 24 HDDs inside it 😁 When I outgrew that, it was time for a rack and a drive shelf connecting to an HBA. lol

See...now THIS is what I'm talking about!!!! Within reach of the home lab, and most peoples pocketbooks! Keep em coming!!!!

Looks great. Has a certain raw mechanical aesthetic i can appreciate.

Looks awesome! Simplicity is key with something like this though. Especially if you can get away with it for half the cost of a JBOD. as someone who bought a 4U case for 15 drives. I can say those HBAs work great. Just need to make sure you spec the PSU the correct size and / or "balance" the drives per power rail so you don't overload one over the other. Found this out the hard way in proxmox when it dropped drives in the middle of the night.....

This was a fun and interesting video. I really enjoy these out of the box ideas.

this is exactly what i was looking for. i have a SFF dell pc im using as a NAS but it only has space for a single drive. i also love enterprise network things and an external jbod with fancy sas cables etc is satisfying

I did the exact same thing for the exact same reasons a few years ago. I absolutely love it.

It’s funny that in the last few days I experienced the same problem. I want to build a little NAS with 8 HDD’s but there is no ITX case available with enough space. And I also don’t want a big case. I really had an eye on the Jonsbo N3. But I can’t buy it anywhere. So I concluded I have to go DIY. My two requirements were all HDD’s internal and it has to be a cube. So I build a little ITX cube frame from metal where I can mount my board, psu, all 8 HDD’s on anti-vibration mounts and fans for the board and the storage. And then I build a acrylic glass shell for my frame. Looks actually not that bad and very clean. And because I love cube cases I just have to like it.

I love it! I’ve been tempted to DIY my own enclosure for years, but never took the plunge.

I didn't know that ad2psu unit existed. That's brilliant.

I'd actually considered building an enclosure myself by picking up two IKEA Lack end tables… You build one, flip it upside down, and mount a motherboard and power supply to the inside. You bolt the 2nd top onto the upturned legs to make a solid box, and the legs get used to make sort of an H above the motherboard to mount these $25ish drive cages from Amazon with rails. Nice thing about those is that you can swap a drive pretty quickly. Remove the cables from the back and the drives slide out the front. They have a "cover" for mounting a fan but … I wouldn't bother, because I've got a better idea. Reason for doing it this way? The top can be removed to help with maintenance. And if you close off the sides, you could put a nice big 20" fan on the front of this thing that'd entirely replace the air volume inside the box every few seconds. Even at low pressure, that'd be effective. You could put some mesh on the back to keep pets from possibly getting in there, but mostly keep it as open front to back as possible. A bonus: If you have any 19" rack gear that'd make a useful part of the system, the spacing on these Lack tables will accommodate, but that might interfere with my planned cooling solution.

You don't believe this! I was actively preparing a similar JBOD. But I go for an old PC case. The small chip to to switch the powerblok on was new to me. Thank you for this cool video!

I like this idea. I am all for doing stuff like this. I have an old case I used for a workstation, and I made my own 4-drive enclosure, which fits right inside the case. I even made a video of it but have not edited any of it. It has been over a year since I did mine. I think I might throw some of the footage up on my channel one day. Essentially, the enclosure design as it slips right into the existing bay. It is pretty cool.

Hey for the washer replacement, you might wanna consider felt tape put on the side of the hdd. Inferior to the silicon/rubber vibration reduction but still can get the job done somewhat (experienced it with my synology nas) and it'll be a bit easier to slide in an out after you have bunch of drives on the said acrylic housing

Good video, if the size of array is going to be an issue, there is an alternative. Icydock do a 6 x 2.5" to 5.25" drive adaptors (MB326SP-B) but these do cost around $90, You could probably get away with a 250W PSU to power the drives. Unless your using SSD's, the 2 fans they have may be adequate, the drives may get warm if used long term so additional ventilation may be required.

I've had good experiences with my Oyen Digital Mobius 5 bay enclosure but I love the DIY nature plus the ability to have twice as many drives.

That actually looks really nice! The black and grey fits great in my opinion.

Thank you sooooooo much for this! I currently have an 8 bay usb 3 and for the last couple of weeks it has been dropping out drives all the time. I use drive pool so that plex can see one drive and as well as my pc. I have moved it between multiple pcs so I know that it is the usb enclosure. I will use this video as my basis for my new system

If you want vibration dampening without the hassle, one thing you can try are silicone grommets for M5, M6, or #6-32 screws. You may need to drill the holes out to a slightly larger size as grommets are supposed to fit inside the hole. Some older cases, particularly Antec, used to come with those. Oh, and one more thing you can do for vibration dampening the entire thing is adding earthquake-resistant gel pads. They are usually clear blue in color, and you should be able to find them at most online stores in the Asia region.

I hate the marketing for Magic Spoon. There is no such thing as grain-free cereal. Cereal is, by definition, grain. That's like saying water-free water.

Really cool to see a good youtube video on a nice JBOD. Very practical and affordable. Also pretty versatile, you could hook up the drives to different computers for example. If you're someone who prefers clusters. Much more affordable than finding a solution to hook up separately for each node. Also, I would prefer using the same power supply for the PC and whatever drives you hook up to you in the JBOD. As someone else pointed out, you could've replaced the PSU in the desktop with your better PSU that you used anyways.

I got myself a 16bay supermicro for cheap. Has hotswap, can be turned into a dedicated storage-box or used as a complete server by mounting a mainboard. And the best: It has hotswap! Was about 200-250$ including a Xeon-Board, CPU, RAM etc. which i didn't use. Years ago i did similar stuff, but after all, nothing beats a professional solution. Anyway, good idea. And the way you added the second PSU is nice! And you are right: I can't even understand why someone would consider USB for connecting storage to a server.

I found this exact thing on Ebay 3 years ago. I got the 8 bay version. So, here is a few pointers from my experience. If you use "Cooler Master Dual SSD" adapter. You just double your 8 or 10 drive to 16 or 20. I have 16 ssd's in my truenas core box. You will have to drill the holes out in the ssd tray and sides to use pc case fan screws. And the 4 holes in the ssd tray may not always line up. Sometimes your stuck using 3. Or just make the holes slightly bigger and just start the screws first. Don't fully tighten until you have them all started. Also, if you want to get creative like I did. You can bend some aluminum sheeting i got from my local hardware store. and 120mm fans fit perfectly behind them. And can even use that side as the bottom. You are just going to need a lot of sata power splitters to get it all to work. But, being ssd's, it's not much poer being drawn. Esp. compared to hdd's.

For the ppl that don't have 3d printers you can still look for an STL file of this rack or any other hdd rack that fits your needs and send it over to a 3D printing service company which will print it and send it over to you. You could choose color, material type and other customisations on many of this companies. Some aren't cheap though.

Just what I needed!

Glue. Glue the fan bridges to construct the cage first. If it's true acrylic and not a plastic of some kind you have to use acrylic safe glue or solvent to "weld" it. Most CA/Super glue will tint it white, but then again, you can just paint over that. Once it's built w/fans mounted it becomes waaaay more stable.

Hi. I love it. I don’t yet have enough need for so many drives, but will keep it in my mind for back to my Synology in the the attic in the future if needs be.

thank you for the names of the items you used. I enjoyed the video

Dig it. Love how compact it is.

I wish it was more common to to sell JBOD enclosures that look like a PC case, but don't use USB and just expose sata connectors on the back

Thank you for attempting to do this. This is something I've gone back and forth on multiple times. My requirment was being able to use 2-4 hard drives. I have a SFF server with an i5-9500, and I wanted to add two HDDs to it. My number one concern was power use and reliability. I ran a janky setup for a few days with SATA cables and power running out of the SFF PC. That would be the most efficient(power wise) but was super janky. I considered USB enclosures, NVME to SATA adapters, but they are known to be unreliable and USB enclosures wouldn't have S.M.A.R.T. An LSI card would be better reliability wise, but would still be janky with hard drives just sitting outside the case. LSI cards don't come cheap either (considering used office PC are cheap), and they would consume about the same or more power than a well optimised 8th to 9th gen Intel SFF PC. Believe it or not, I was able to get my SFF i5-9500 down to 8-9W of power consumption with one NVMe SSD. So I decided to run another server dedicated to NAS. This gives me about the same power consumption as your setup would, plus I have an additional set of CPU, iGPU and RAM. The best part is the systems are super stable, not janky and even combined, they are low on power consumption. My SFF server runs Jellyfin, HomeAssisstant, and my virtual Windows PC. ...and the second server just hosts a NAS (for now). This is the compromise I'm happy with for now. My second server has a Haswell i5-4570 that I run in single core config. It doesn't idle down as much as my i5-9500 but it's close enough. I am on the lookout for a cheap 6+ gen i5 full size tower to replace it for good.

** little handy trick I use, assuming cosmetics is not of major importance, buy a roll of galvanized strapping from homedepot/rona/etc(plumbing/hvac/etc)... stuff is cheap and can cut strips to extend existing drive shelves(can fit it inbetween drives and shelf or screws); stuff is cheap sturdy enough when drives are mounted to it and can be done with minimal effort:)

Working on something very similar at the moment. My power solution is to use two different SATA cables from the PSU, and ziptie them as they hang out of a vertical PCI bracket hole in the case so they stick out a few inches and just use SATA power extensions and splitters to power the drives. Currently running 4 drives off one SATA power cable but I'm hoping I can hook up 8 to one without anything melting.

I would try to eliminate the separate ATX PSU on the desk. Either put that into the main case, or use some kind of AC-DC brick which is beefy enough to run the drives. Then I would also try to create some sort of 3D printed backpanel and/or a base box below the enclosure to hide all the tangling wires (and the power brick). I think it would look very tidy that way.

I did a very similar thing with my server, but for my own needs I went a fair bit over what you did. I'm using the same HBA, but instead of using the mini SAS 8088 - 4x SATA, I have an 8088-8088 cable plugged into a SAS expander. This means I can use much cheaper mini SAS 8087 to 4x SATA (or in my case, SAS, which is basically an upgraded version of SATA) cables - with the added bonus that I can now connect up to 32 hard drives per 8088 port - for a total of 128 drives on a single host pcie slot. There are some drawbacks to my version, primarily that I'll be limited by pcie lanes when I add more drives in the future - the main HBA is pcie 2. The drives on the expander can go up to 3gbps per drive, which isn't going to be an issue for rust disks, so if you're using ssds, you should use something else. All of this fits into a corsair ATX case that I've filled with fans, a 3D printed drive rack that goes in place of the motherboard (holds 16 3.5" drives), an always on PSU, plus an additional 6 3.5" drive bays that come with the case. Its a bit jank and I have some issues to work out, but its pretty darn cool and it looks sick, if I do say so myself. If @hardwarehaven wants some pics/more info let me know and I'll get in touch - it could be an interesting video.

That a decent bit of hardware hackery!! Love your video production mate!

Nice build! A way cheaper but very reliable way to remote the second PSU is a relay with a 12 or 5 V trigger. With the NO and C outputs on the relay hooked to the 2nd PSU's power on pin and ground. The trigger is obvious, any spare 12V or 5V connector from the first PSU. Been using this method for my Hotswappable cages on my NAS for years without a hiccup.

Very neat setup. I had never heard of that ADD2PSU device, when I went to configure 30 HDDs for UnRAID (just because how awesome would it be to connect 30 HDDs) I used a passive 24pin splitter I had laying around from back when I was doing ETH mining and the rigs always needed 2x PSUs. They are cheaper too. FYI btw, I seem to always stumble into your videos. Very clean video, well presented, informative, one of the best, and just seems to answer questions I had, and didn't know to ask. Thanks.

Great video. I learned a lot, and its nice to see someone not just shilling products.

Awesome and very creative. Keep up the creativity!

The gray fans look sick AF. Very nice video, I really learned a lot! Thanks for your hard work making these videos. Using a power supply that's 650W at only 65W (about 10% of max) is typically very efficient compared to using a PSU near it's maximum power. Using a second PSU instead of adding those 65W of drives to your 400W lenovo PSU was a very good move.

I've built two 12 bay JBODs using used SuperMicro gear I bought on eBay. The first one was kind of tough because i wasn't sure which cables and adapters to use, but the second one was a breeze! Not including drives, I have 24 slots for under $500.

Those sata extensions cables work really well for the 3.3 volt problem for shucked drives. You can peel the back cover off and just take the 3.3 volt cable out and put the covers right back on.

I've always liked your diy solutions for home use, ever since that diy server nas board video you made in the beginning. If you ever get a 3d printer, I'd put some kinda panels for the front and rear of the jbod.

For years and year I've thought going the some route, and since I've recently managed to grab 2 n40l HP Microservers, I'll be gating them and repurpose the 2 miniSAS to SATA, the power supply and build somewhat system like yours. Love your vid's man and I've always taken your experience and knowledge in consideration Cheers form Portugal

Another option is to look for spare server parts, namely their hot swap drive cages. These will probably take 1 sff8087/8643 and 1 molex per 4 drives. Then you do everything you did here with the appropriate cables. It will probably be slightly more expensive, but much much easier to assemble and maintain. Edit: ah okay you mentioned those at the end never mind 😅

I did a similar thing with two strips of metal, drilling holes and just using drive screws to keep them all in place. The drive screws will work themselves loose after a while, so I put polyimide tape over them to stop that. The strips of metal were some very cheap metal rulers, which had the added benefit of making it easy to mark out the holes evenly spaced. You don't need to use rulers, they were just cheaper than metal strips. Economies of scale, or something, I guess.

hmm, I thought I spent too much on my jbod, but I guess I didn't. It literally cost me the same $220 to get a 3.5" drive cage portion of a hp server, a hba controller, and drive caddys. The cage came with sas and power cables, so I modified the power cables to connect to a standard psu and it all seems to just work. I have another hp cage, 2.5", that I can make another array with at some point and it all works together. Also it is good you added the fans, I didn't realize how hot 12 drives get when they are stacked together, I now prop a fan I had lying around next to the cage when it's running. This is used for my offline backups, so I don't have it running all the time.